Carrie Underwood says she was worried her son Isaiah would be scared of her after she severely injured her face in a fall outside their home in November.
The 35-year-old singer received more than 40 stitches there. She also broke her wrist and required surgery. After the accident, she told her fans she may look "a bit different." Underwood stopped posting clear photos of her face on social media and stayed out of the spotlight until this past weekend, when she made a comeback at the 2018 ACM Awards. After she took to the stage to perform her new single, "Cry Pretty," fans remarked online that she does not look different at all.
Underwood gave her first interviews since the fall on Thursday. The singer said she landed on an area around her mouth.
"For a while, I was worried he would be scared of me," Underwood said on iHeartRadio's The Bobby Bones Show podcast about her 3-year-old son, who she shares with husband Mike Fisher. "But now if I put makeup on, he's like, 'Mommy, your boo-boo's all gone.'"
She said on the podcast and in an interview with host Storme Warren on SiriusXM's The Highway channel that she fell while taking her dogs out at night.
"I was clumsy and I tripped," she told Warren. "I held onto the dog leashes in my left hand and went to catch myself with my right and just missed the step. There's one lone step. I said if I had fallen anywhere else, I would have been absolutely fine, but it's just because there was, I went to catch myself and I missed."
"I thought I just busted my lip. Then I walked inside and took the dog leashes off and took my coat off and went to go survey the damage and was like, Oh, no!" she said, adding, "It wasn't pretty."
She said she also chipped a tooth but that mostly her skin was damaged.
"I felt like we put a memo out to the fan club," she said. "Just because I was like, man, somebody's gonna catch me at the Kroger. I'm gonna be buying groceries and somebody's gonna like post something on Instagram and people are gonna be like, 'What's going on?'"
"I've been very fortunate in the healing process," she said on the podcast. "I was lucky that when it happened, everything was kind of shutting down in the music world and we had the holidays and stuff like that. I was at a point where I didn't know how things were going to end up. I didn't know what was going to go on. I didn't know what it was going to heal like."
Underwood said on the SiriusXM show that the hardest part of her recovery was dealing with a broken wrist.
"I can't use my appendage and I'm trying to pick my kid up and make food and do mom stuff," said the singer.
"I have a metal plate in my wrist," she said. "It's good now."
Amid her recovery, Underwood worked on her new sixth studio album, also called Cry Pretty. The new record is set for release in September.